July 28, 2024 – The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost
The Rev. Claire Keene
Amy, my stepdaughter, recently helped her partner clear out and give away
most of the personal effects remaining when her partner’s mother, Carol, died. They didn’t get rid of everything, of course—Carol had been a good hobby painter, so there were paintings to find a place for on their walls. There were photo albums, too, filled up during mother-in-law Carol’s long life. Those things they kept, made room for the.
But they had many other things to pass on to others who might need them: clothes of various sizes, a hospital bed, a rollater and walking stick, a walker, a small TV, a dresser, and pretty vases and such that they had moved into their condo when Carol left her own house after her last hospital stay. That move also meant selling Carol’s house, her car, her washer, dryer, refrigerator, you name it.
Amy and Wendy were doing all this transition-schlepping while working fulltime. So during one of my visits after Carol’s death, Amy turned toward me and said, “And don’t you leave that much stuff for me to take care of!”
I get that. I really get that. I was only one of several children
working to empty my parents’ two-story house where they had lived for 50 years, raising the five of us. Even with five of us to pitch in, it took a while. “Leftovers Were Us.”
Have you heard of “Swedish death cleaning? Author Margareta Magnusson coined the phrase in her 2017 book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. “Swedish death cleaning” is a Scandinavian method of decluttering your home before you die to lessen the burden on your grieving loved ones after you’re gone. The idea is simple. It means getting rid of everything we can as a gift to those who will have to take care of whatever we leave behind. That sounds like such a good idea. But it’s not a simple thing to do.
And I couldn’t help but be reminded of it by what Jesus says to the disciples after every one of the five thousand has eaten as much as they wanted. There’s no doubt they ate a lot. (In the other three gospels it’s five thousand men AND their women and children.) After Jesus himself has given the crowd all the bread and fish they want, he says, “Gather up the fragments left over so that nothing may be lost.” Whatever size a “basketful” may have been, the 12 baskets full of bread they gathered up sounds like quite a bit.
What would you do if you went to a church picnic, and right after everyone was done eating, someone came up to you and said, “Okay, we have 12 baskets full of bread leftover. Who is going to handle this—we don’t want any of it to be wasted. Can we send it home with you?”
What would you do? Would you refuse to be bothered with them, or would you
maybe take the fragments home, turn them into your famous bread pudding, and serve that up with a dab of ice cream for next Sunday’s lunch at KARM? Or maybe take them home, freeze them, and stuff some Thanksgiving turkeys with them for the Knoxville Salvation Army? Feed them to the birds at the World’s Fair Park?
Just as with the extravagant quantity of wine Jesus provides at his first miracle, the wedding in Cana,Jesus’ his first miracle, “abundance” and “generosity” seem to be spelled out in all caps whenever Jesus acts, and the crowd notices it. No wonder the crowd wants to take him by force and make him king. No wonder Jesus needs to escape that flock spread out around him on the grass if he is ever to teach them his deepest generosity, his deepest love. He hasn’t yet had a chance to teach them about dying and rising, about giving ourselves away and losing nothing.
Jesus has a habit of feeding all who are hungry for a meaningful life, as well as those who are hungry for bread. He is willing to receive the leftovers of our lives, in other words, and turn them into something else: something useful, something beautiful, something life-giving and God-serving. For example, let’s say you have memories from a failed marriage. Maybe Jesus wants to turn them into gentle support for a friend who is struggling now with his or her spouse.
Do you have leftover stories your grandparents told about losing their jobs in the depression, and how they learned to make do? Maybe your grandchildren need to hear them. Maybe your aunt can tell you how she prayed for your brother when he was drafted for the Viet Nam war, so you can learn how to pour out your heart before God in concern for your nephew, who is now experimenting with drugs.
Maybe the family friend who sewed can teach you how she took dresses and blouses, cut them up into squares, and made by hand the quilt that she
sent off to college with her grandniece. Maybe your grandmother can borrow back that old churn in your hallway and teach your child how she used to churn butter, just the way she showed you when you were five.
Maybe your Dad, who first heard classical music in college as he studied one floor below the rehearsal hall, might offer to play his recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for you one more time, and then let you could copy that recording to play it for someone else. Maybe your mother’s best friend might show you how she arranged flowers from her yard for worship at your church, so your congregation could benefit from your sharing that leftover.
Maybe your great uncle can teach you how he shaped chairs in his woodshop, or show you how he made that chest of drawers for his late wife, who loved. Maybe that woman who volunteers at the Volunteer Ministry Center can tell you exactly what kind of pottery is best for a new resident moving in straight off the street so you can make some?
Maybe you remember how your mom stretched the milk bill for her large family by mixing powdered milk into whole milk every week, so that all her children could have strong bones and teeth, and you could pass that information on to a young mother you know whose budget is really stretched.
Whatever the leftovers of your abundance are, gather them up so that nothing God has given may be lost. Gather them up, so that nothing in your life is wasted.
We so often think of our bounty—the stuff we have shoved into a closet and don’t want to see turned into trash—as a burden. Excess can be a burden, if we have presumed that thriving means always buying something new with the money we’ve just earned. But maybe, just maybe, we can discover tangible miracles of love and abundance in our leftovers. Maybe we can discover that even our memories are baskets full of holy abundance. Most of us are hungry for something, and most of us have quite a few “things left over,” as our Gospel lesson puts it. Pretty much everybody, at some point, has left an old way of life for a new one. Even when we knew that change is for the best, we probably wondered, “What happens now? How do I make a life in this wilderness? And who will go with me?” Pretty much everybody, at some point, has known the challenge of making a life out of what someone else left behind. Pretty much everybody has discovered a path through some wilderness by the grace of somebody else.
Jesus aims to fill our hungers—he’s the one who distributed that meal of fish and bread till all were fed, remember? And Jesus also aims to turn the fragments left from your life into something new, some kind of abundance for someone else.
Abundance, creativity, and generosity that’s what we’re talking about. Abundance, creativity, and generosity will keep you alive. Whether you are generously giving or receiving abundance from someone else, these three will keep you alive, keep you loving. So don’t discount any part of your life. Value the leftovers of what once fed your hungry heart, or body, or soul, and offer those leftovers up, that nothing may be lost.
This is how we pass through things temporal without losing things eternal. This is how we meet the prophet who comes into the world, offering us His glory as grace.
Year B – The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost – July 28, 2024 – The Rev. Claire Keene
